The Memory Game

The Memory Game

He has done everything right, his whole life. It’s his time. It’s very unfair to bring up an ancient, minor, childish faux pa to prevent him for achieving his very same childhood dream of serving the people on the high court. Everybody does it, or did it then for sure. It was the times. He was an innocent virgin. He was drunk at the time. Boys will be boys. Whew, let’s move on here, shall we.

I have troubles with memory myself, we all do, its an imprecise, tricky thing, memory is. Why it was just brought home to me a few years ago.

Using the Wayback machine I have
to tell a story. Sorry, sorry. When I was a young engineer at Big Aerospace
Company in the early 1980s. BAC, not Boeing Aerospace Company BTW. Big
Aerospace Company, hired two women engineers out of school. My boss at the time
had a lunch picnic in a part with a 6’ subway sandwich to introduce them. I
liked them both right away, and they were very good engineers.

One, we can call her Kathy, went
through all the backgrounding to be cleared to work on my project. We ended up
in an office together with a couple other people outside the big cubicle farm.
The program was overflowing space at the time and stuffing people everywhere.

We had those big gray steel desks
with gray rubber tops in a room with cream-colored walls and gray, tightly
closed steel shutters over the big window along the back wall. We used punch
cards to program the Univac mainframe to solve our engineering problems and had
a few Texas Instruments Silent 700 computer terminals with long rolls of
thermal paper spewing out of them to edit our programs with, once they were in
the computer using all those boxes of cards. A few years later we got a dark
room with actual CRT computer terminals with full-page editors to do our programming
on! It was very state of the art, man.

I liked Kathy and we became
lifelong friends. I went on to many other companies, and Kathy stayed at BAC
and eventually became an executive on a large program. She became a Chief
Systems Engineer, which is a #2 position after the Program Manager who can have
hundreds of employees reporting and budget authority in the $billions. These
would be big companies in their own right if they were separate entities.

I had lunch with Kathy a couple
of years ago when I moved out of the area. She told me a story about our time
in the office with the gray steel desks. I did not remember it! It took a
struggle to dredge it out of the memory banks, but I finally did.

Let me say that I can have a
little troll in me, well maybe a lot according to my children. But what do they
know! During my time in the office we had dealings with peers at Another Big
Aerospace Company. Kathy got a call from a young ABAC engineer about a
technical interface meeting he was coming to BAC for. He said something to
Kathy to the effect of: “can you give me a man to talk to, honey.” He presumed
she was a secretary or some assistanty type, not an engineer, even though he
had been given her name as the technical contact by his company. She handed me
the phone and I coordinated his visit. That’s where the trouble started. I had
an idea.

When he came for his visit the
next day I asked Kathy, we had this planned, to wait for the signal in the
office while I went to meet him in our large subsystem cubicle area with four
or five other engineers around the sides and a visitor desk to use for
meetings. It was all smiles and hand shaking, then I asked him to wait a second
while I asked somebody to join us. I went and got Kathy and made a big show of
introducing her in front of everybody as a very good engineer we were lucky to
have snatched up. He got all red and stuff.

I left him and Kathy at the
visitor desk to have their meeting, after all she was his peer on the topic,
not me. I think it went fine after that.

It’s funny that I did not
remember all that until the lunch with Kathy 33 years later. I can see it all
clearly now in my head, but it took her reminding me. She had remembered it for
all those years and thanked me for it at our lunch.